The Work
Where Connection Becomes the Work.
She offers transformation — in the way a room listens, a team relates, a clinician sees.
The Work
She offers transformation — in the way a room listens, a team relates, a clinician sees.
01 — Keynote Speaking
Verena is one of the most distinctive voices in health equity and culturally informed care in Canada. Her keynotes move beyond information delivery into something audiences feel long after the event.
She combines professional insight with personal narrative to create talks that are equal parts educational and deeply human.
Drawing on over 15 years of clinical work, she explores joy not as a feeling to be pursued but as a practice to be built — one that expands your capacity to lead, absorb difficulty, and remain present when the pressure is highest.
Best for: Corporate teams, leadership retreats, healthcare teams, wellbeing programming.
Some of the most formative lessons don’t arrive by choice. This keynote moves through the landscape of intimate loss — what it does to us, what it asks of us, and what it quietly makes possible when we stop resisting it. Through clinical insight, personal narrative, and spoken word, Verena traces the unlikely relationship between grief and growth — not as a path from darkness to light, but as a reckoning that teaches us who we are and how we want to live. This is not a grief workshop. It is an invitation to stop treating loss as the interruption of life, and start recognizing it as one of life’s most honest teachers.
Best for: Healthcare and mental health conferences, leadership retreats, women’s leadership conferences, university and community audiences, anyone navigating change, loss, or transition.
Note: Personal details underpinning this keynote are intentionally withheld from the site and reserved for the live talk.
Weaving together the neuroscience of trauma, the psychology of post-traumatic growth, and the deeply human art of making meaning. This is not a talk about bouncing back — it is about what it actually takes to move forward without leaving yourself behind.
Best for: Corporate leadership summits, executive teams, healthcare and mental health conferences, military audiences.
On intention, community, and the courage to break barriers. Weaving together storytelling, clinical insight, and spoken word poetry, Verena takes audiences through three movements.
Best for: Women's leadership conferences, healthcare teams, BIPOC professional networks, university audiences.
For the professionals who have learned to make themselves smaller to be taken more seriously. This talk names the tax that code-switching, hypervisibility, and chronic self-editing places on performance, creativity, and health.
Best for: Corporate ERGs, BIPOC professional networks, women's leadership, D&I programming.
In high-pressure moments, trust is not a soft skill — it is a strategic one. Through the TRUST lens — a practical lens Verena developed for first responders and clinicians — this talk explores how race, context, and lived experience influence behaviour in crisis.
Best for: First responders, law enforcement, emergency departments, correctional health teams, military health services.
Verena draws on her specialized work with migrants, children of migrants, military members, and incarcerated individuals to map how cultural background shapes the way people experience suffering, seek help, and find their way through it.
Best for: Healthcare providers, psychotherapists, social workers, organizations serving diverse populations.
Equal parts reckoning and roadmap. This talk leaves organizations with a clearer picture of who they're currently serving, who they're missing, and what it would take to change that.
Best for: Health authorities, hospitals, military health services, medical and nursing schools.
A compelling, evidence-informed case for relational medicine — delivered not as a critique of the profession, but as an invitation to its highest expression.
Best for: Medical teams, nursing and NP conferences, hospital leadership, health authorities.
All keynotes are available in 30, 45, or 60-minute formats and can be adapted for conference, workshop, or retreat settings.
Inquire About Keynotes →
02 — Workshops & Training
Verena's workshops are not passive. They are experiential, evidence-based, and built for teams who are ready to do the actual work — not just talk about it.
Each workshop is tailored to your organization's specific needs, culture, and context. No generic slide decks. No borrowed frameworks. Every session is built from clinical expertise, lived experience, and 15 years of knowing what actually moves people.
03 — Clinical Training
For healthcare providers, institutions, and systems ready to close the gap between the care they intend to deliver and the care their patients actually experience.
Verena's clinical training is grounded in 15+ years of frontline practice in military health, federal corrections, and migrant health — the spaces where the gaps are widest and the stakes are highest.
04 — Consulting
For organizations navigating complexity — systems change, equity initiatives, cultural transformation, or leadership development — Verena brings clinical authority, lived experience, and strategic clarity.
Not sure where to start? Most people who work with Verena didn't know exactly what they needed until they talked to her. That's what the first conversation is for.
Book a Conversation →
With a real conversation.
Verena doesn't offer packages. She doesn't do off-the-shelf. She works with organizations that understand that the most important problems — the ones that are costing them people, trust, and performance — don't come with a standard solution.
Whether you're bringing her to your conference stage, your clinical team, or your leadership table: the work is always tailored. The outcomes are always real. And the starting point is always the same.
Tell her about your people.
She'll tell you what's possible.
Start the Conversation →